Stalinist Lawlessness: Companies Must Swear to IRS They Didn't Fire Employees Because of Obamacare

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, there's so much going on out there. The lawlessness of this Regime knows no bounds. There's nothing stopping this man from doing anything. If he wants to raise marginal tax rates, he can just do it. Nobody's gonna stop him. Here is the latest. As you know, the Regime recently delayed the implementation of the employer mandate for three years, until 2016. This means that employers who have a hundred or less employees will be subject to the mandate.

The point of this is that this limit of 100 is a golden opportunity for businesses to, once again, fire people to get under that number of 100 so that they are eligible for the delay of the mandate. So what the Obama Regime has done, is said firms and businesses are going to be required to certify to the IRS -- under penalty of perjury -- that Obamacare was not a motivating factor in their staffing decisions.

I mean, this is absolutely lawless. It is against the law. They cannot, ladies and gentlemen, do this. Specifically, they cannot run businesses this way. They cannot turn staffing decisions into crimes, and this is exactly what they're doing. Businesses make decisions all the time on the basis of avoidance of costs here and costs there, labor costs, tax costs. They do it all the time -- and this is a tax.

Don't forget, the Supreme Court claimed that all of this is constitutional because these mandates are just taxes. They're not mandates to buy a product. That would be unconstitutional. Of course, that doesn't matter now anyway.

"Obama officials made clear in a press briefing that firms would not be allowed to lay off workers to get into the preferred class of those businesses with 50 to 99 employees," because those businesses are the ones exempt from Obamacare and the employer mandate for three years. Between 50 and 99 employees, you're exempted. So if you have 103 employees and you fire four of them.

You now have to certify to the IRS, under threat of perjury, that you didn't do that to avoid Obamacare costs. I mean, you can duck the law, but then only if you promise not to say you're doing that. Companies must now swear to the IRS that none of their layoffs are because of Obamacare. This must be in writing. It is made under threat of perjury charges. So what they're trying to avoid here, obviously, is laying people off.

But more than that, they don't want businesses saying that they're laying people off or firing people because of Obamacare. That's really what the rub is, and it boils down to they can do what they want but they better not say that they're firing people because of Obamacare. Now, it's been running around, going around here, that this is a banana republic. This is way beyond a banana republic now. This is Stalinism.

This is sheer, brazen lawlessness. There is nothing stopping Obama if he wants to raise somebody's tax rates or to eliminate somebody's tax rates. I mean, there's nothing stopping him from doing virtually anything he wants to do, because nobody's stopping him now. Nobody is. In fact, the Republicans are doing everything they can to avoid any kind of disagreement. The debt limit thing? You heard about that.

"Oh, yeah, well, we gotta focus on Obamacare. We can't run the risk here of getting into a fight with Obama on the debt and shutting down the government again. We can't have that!" Besides, they're trying to blame all of this on the Tea Party, trying to blame all of this debt business on the Republican side on the Tea Party and then claiming, "Well, you know, we can't do anything about it anyway. We don't have 218 votes.

"If you don't have 218 votes, you can't do anything. There's no reason to stand for anything. We don't have the votes, and we don't want shut down the government. We'll get blamed again. So we'll just do this. We'll just let the president expand the debt limit. We'll go along with it, we'll endorse it, and then we'll really focus on Obamacare for the rest of the year." That's just... It's hard to comprehend this. We're in uncharted territory.

Nobody knows what to do here.

Everybody's sitting around waiting for somebody else to do something. No, seriously. How many of you...? I mean, this is not a criticism. How many of you, upon learning that businesses now cannot blame Obamacare for firing people and getting them to the 100 employee limit...? You can't do that. You can't fire 'em for that reason, and you can't say that you did it for that reason if you fire 'em.

You have to promise the IRS that Obamacare had nothing to do with your staffing decisions. Just the mandate delay itself, the waiver here, all of the changes in Obamacare. Let me ask you: How many of you have asked yourself, "Who's gonna stop this? How are we gonna stop this?" Everybody has asked it. Boehner, Mitch McConnell, everybody in Washington is saying, "How are we gonna stop this?"

Nobody knows how to stop it.

Rand Paul is threatening to sue the president.

That's gonna be come down to does he have standing or not. Mike Lee, senator from Utah. I've got a piece in the Stack today about the problems with suing the president, how difficult it is. You must have standing in order to sue the president. If you're a business, for example, you have to be able to prove without any doubt whatsoever that you have incurred is exclusively tied to Obama's policies.

And then, even if you found a business or a group of them that wanted to sue, then you've got, "We don't have the money compared to these guys." They've got the Justice Department, they've got Eric Holder, they've got the judges. What difference will it make to sue? Then you've got impeachment. Nobody's talking about that. No way that's gonna ever gonna happen. No matter what. They're not even gonna talk about that.

So how does it stop? We're in uncharted territory here. All the commentators... I mean, one of the conventional bits of wisdom inside the Beltway commentariat today is, "You know, if people would have started speaking out against this when it first started happening, then maybe we could do something about it." But before we get to that, there's something I want to say about commentators and so forth.

What is the role of a commentator? Is the role of a commentator just to sit there and tell you what he thinks and then go home, or is a commentator attempting to marshal public opinion for what he believes for the purposes of creating action within the body politic? What's the purpose? I would submit to you that a whole lot of commentators just gonna tell you what they think and that's it. They go home at the end of the day, and that's the job. "I'm gonna tell you what I think.

"But whatever happens after that, we're all in it for ourselves. Every man, every woman for herself/himself." Of course the most fundamental way to stop Obama is to simply deny him the money for what he wants to do, and that happens in the House of Representatives -- House of Representatives, Ways and Means Committee specifically. The House of Representatives is where every spending bill originates.

That's where they were talking about defunding the Iraq war, the Democrats in there back in the day. That's where that would have happened. Power of the purse. It all boils down to that. That's whatever techniques there are available to stop this. We then have to make the leap: Is there the will to do it? And that's takes us into another problematic area.

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RUSH: This is really big, folks. We tend to gloss over these things after we mention them and move on to the next thing, but this ruling from the White House that employers are required to certify to the IRS -- under penalty of perjury -- that the waiver was not a motivating factor in their hiring and firing decisions... So, in other words, to avoid Obamacare costs, you have to promise, you have to swear under oath that you're not trying to avoid Obamacare costs -- and everybody's trying to avoid Obamacare costs!

That's why they're being waived.

They're punitive. My friend Andy McCarthy wrote about this. He did it great. Think about how lunatic this is: This is nothing even faintly illegal about businesses making financial decisions based on tax consequences. They do it every day. Remember, notwithstanding Obama's misrepresentations to the contrary, Obamacare mandates our taxes. The Justice Department argued that, and Chief Justice Roberts agreed.

The mandates requiring you to buy a product were called taxes by the Supreme Court in order to claim that all of this is aboveboard and constitutional. The federal government, the Commerce Clause, cannot mandate that citizens buy a product or service. So the Regime said, "Well, we're not doing that. We're just levying a tax," and the Supreme Court agreed. So Obamacare is just a series of taxes, really punitive taxes.

And businesses have been trying to figure out how to do their best in avoiding as many of them as possible, which is standard operating procedure, because the tax consequences of Obamacare are profound. They can ruin a business. They can put it out of business. That's exactly why Obama is waiving them, folks, until after this year's elections and the 2016 elections. Obamacare is destructive. Obamacare is destroying everything in its path.

The enrollment this year, 2014, has slowed to a crawl.

Folks, it is unmitigated disaster, and they're doubling down on all of it now.

No responsible person running a business of any size would fail to take all of these Obamacare taxes into account in making the decision how to staff the company -- and if you have an opportunity to avoid these punitive taxes for three more years by having fewer than a hundred employees, you're going to damn well do it. It would be the responsible thing to do -- and because Obama knows that's going to happen, he's come along now and told them they can't do it, just cause he says so.

And furthermore, if they do it, they have to swear to the IRS that they're not doing it because of anything having to do with him.

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RUSH: This attempt to criminalize normal, everyday, standard, responsible business decision making is outrageous, and that is exactly what's going on. Barack Obama and all of his supporters and the entire administration are now attempting to criminalize standard, ordinary, everyday intelligent business decision making, where what is really illegal and irrational is not what a company does to limit its costs. That's smart.

A company must limit its costs. Profitability is how you stay in business. It's how you keep people employed. It's how you provide them health care. What's illegal in spades is Obama's edict. Now, look what comes with this illegal edict from The One. Criminal prosecution. If Obama's Justice Department (i.e., Eric Holder) decides that a business has falsely certified that it's staffing decision was not motivated by Obamacare, criminal prosecution follows.

Now, stop and think about something here.

The waiver itself is illegal.

Barack Obama does not have the constitutional authority, nor power, to make this waiver. He cannot willy-nilly change this law. The text of the law is enshrined as law. It has been signed into law by him, after being duly passed by Congress. He cannot willy-nilly go in and say, "That paragraph is not gonna apply for three years. That paragraph's not gonna apply for five years. That whole section over there isn't gonna apply until next summer."

He cannot do that, but that's what he's doing.

The waiver in the first place is illegal.

Extending the waiver to 2016, delaying the implementation of the mandate, is illegal. Whether you like it or not, the law is the law. He cannot change the law on a dime, on his own whim. Not legally. So, to start, the waiver is illegal. The extension of delaying the mandate is illegal. It turns upside down the language of the Obamacare statute, under which the employer mandate is required already to have been implemented by now.

There is nothing in the law that lets Obama waive the mandate.

There is certainly nothing in the law that allows him to attach further lawless to this lawless waiver. We are so far over the line of legality here that many people have lost sight of the original line of legal and illegal. We are so far past it. The waiver is illegal. Delaying the mandate is illegal. And then, furthermore, telling businesses that they must not staff their businesses on the basis of the waiver under penalty of law is itself illegal.

A business that seeks to use the waiver and fails to pay the mandated tax is in violation of the law, regardless of its compliance with Obama's outlaw edict. Yet here's Obama. He's just happy as he can be at his state dinner and he's out there proclaiming his illegal waiver with impunity. He's just up there like a king, "I'm gonna delay this. You know what? I'm gonna delay it for three years, and you know why?

"It's 'cause I don't want to hurt my party in November." He's just announcing he's gonna delay this thing for three years -- and then on top of that, he attaches illegality to people who then govern their businesses as a result of the waiver. I once attended lecture by Lady Margaret Thatcher, and the subject of her lecture was the rule of law. Sometime later, I found myself, fortunately, sitting right next to her at a dinner party.

She was still on the subject months later. She was like that. She would get focused in like a laser on one subject and just spend as much time as she wanted to discussing it -- and, of course, taking the table discussion with her. Her discussion on the rule of law and how crucial it is to the coherence of a free society, obviously it was profound, and I've been thinking about it a lot lately, because that's what's gone by the wayside here.

The one thing -- and there are many things, but one thing -- that really sets us apart is the natural respect for the law that everybody has had. The rule of law. I mean, not individual lawbreakers. Don't misunderstand. But the responsible portion of our population that makes the country work respects the rule of law. It institutionally, fundamentally understands it.

Maybe even not specifically, but they understand the importance of respecting the rule of law, and the limits. Don't forget something crucial. I want to go back and remind you of something I read in a book, Daniel Hannan, the British member of parliament wrote. One of the great differences between us and the Europeans is Europeans believe that everything is illegal until a government makes it legal. We don't.

We grow up, we're born, and our culture is everything is legal until we pass laws making something illegal. It's a huge difference in mind-set. When you start out thinking that everything is illegal, and the only thing that makes something legal is from some president -- king, state, what have you -- you're already a prisoner. You already have given up every ounce of freedom that you are innately created with when you believe that.

If you believe that nothing is legal until some third-party, some leader, some king proclaims it legal, then you do not believe that freedom is the natural yearning of the human condition. It's another thing that has set the United States apart. Now, what is it that makes us proclaim something illegal? It hasn't been dictatorial leaders. It hasn't been statists. It hasn't been tyranny. It has been combination of religion, common law, natural law, and cultural experience, which has given us our legal code.

It's tried and true. It's given us the definitions in our institutions. You know, what is marriage? Sorry, it is a union of a man and a woman. It's just the definition. That's why anything that's not man and a woman cannot be marriage. It may be something else, but it isn't marriage. You can claim it is, you can say it is, but it isn't. The rule of law is what has gone by the wayside.

What is so profoundly disturbing here is that the one person who takes a specific oath to defend the Constitution -- to protect the Constitution, to defend the laws of the United States and to enforce the laws -- is the one bastardizing them. The rule of law is disintegrating before our eyes. And because it is happening on such an unprecedented scale, we are getting into big trouble we'll fast. Things are going very bad really fast. It's getting worse faster than anybody thought even after Obama won in 2012.

As such, nobody knows what to do. Nobody knows how to deal with this, and everybody's hands are tied by one giant elephant in the room that nobody's gonna be able to do anything about, and that is the historical aspect of this presidency. It's just untouchable. But despite all that, this is happening. The very fabric, the very rule of law that is the glue that's held the country together -- our culture, society together -- is just being obliterated.

It's not actually disintegrating.

It's under assault.

It's being attacked.

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RUSH: There's another aspect of this, aside from the lawlessness. There's a political aspect to what Obama's doing with businesses and the IRS, because everything Obama does is political -- and what this does is silence critics. He is silencing business critics of Obamacare. They now cannot criticize Obamacare. If they do, they've got the IRS coming after 'em -- and it has already been established that the Regime will use the IRS to crush its opponents.

Nobody stopped that, either.

It is an infringement of the First Amendment.

The First Amendment's not alive.

The First Amendment can't stand up and say, "Stop! You're abridging me!" Of course it's an abridgement of the First Amendment. So then what? They are silencing their critics. Businesses cannot say that they are firing people because of Obamacare. Therefore, they can't be critical of Obamacare. When businesses cannot tell the media how many people they had to layoff, or how many people they had to convert part time because of Obamacare, then the low-information crowd isn't gonna hear about it.

Nobody's gonna hear. They can't tell anybody under threat of penalty from the IRS. I stress again: Everybody knows already that the IRS has been used by the Regime to target its political opponents. Now, it's always been assumed that happened here and there, willy-nilly. Now it's out in the open. Everybody knows it, and it is serving and will continue to serve to shut people up and to intimidate them.

You just can't tell anybody. That probably is something equally important to Obama, in addition to the political ramifications for the election 2014 and 2016 -- and even if they do risk the IRS, if they do actually lay off people because of Obamacare, they'll never be able to admit it publicly. So, in addition to everything else, this is just a way for Obama to silence business criticism before the elections.

Remember, nothing is simply self-contained. The president has now made it clear that businesses will run afoul of him if they criticize him. Others will think the same thing will happen to them even if they're not mentioned. It's much easier to be afraid of this stuff, and just shut up and not call attention to yourself, than it is to fight it. It's a violation of the First Amendment, a violation of any number of laws. All of this is illegal.

That doesn't stop it. A law making it illegal to rob banks doesn't stop that. Laws against murder don't stop murder. What does? Well, arguably nothing stops murder other than another gun. The law is a mechanism for punishment, obviously, for those who violate it. It's a challenging thing for people. This is uncharted territory for a lot of people, particularly commentators who do not want to be involved in any kind of activism at all. They just want to get the platitudes of being great thinkers and then go pour a Johnnie Walker Blue.